BOYNTON BEACH

Authorities are investigating a suspected case ofhuman trafficking involving a 26-year-old suburban West Palm Beach man and a teenage girl.

Boynton Beach police arrested Steven Snipe on June 30 on three counts of lewd and lascivious battery against a person under the age of 18. Additional charges for human trafficking and production of child pornography are pending, waiting on the completion of a search warrant for a hotel room where Snipe is suspected of selling the teen into prostitution, and for his cellphone devices, according to a police report.

As of Monday morning, Snipe remained in custody at the Palm Beach County Jail after a judge set his bail bond amount at $45,000.

At least 10 people in Palm Beach County and one in Martin County have been arrested for human trafficking this year as local-law enforcement agencies have increasingly focused on a crime described by many as modern-day slavery.

Police say that Snipe met a juvenile runaway about two months ago through the Backpage website and forced her into prostitution.

This is a developing story. Check back later for more details.

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NEW: Man accused of lewd behavior, faces human trafficking charge - Palm Beach Post

Young children know that name-calling is wrong. Tweens are taught the perils of online bullying and revenge porn: It's unacceptable and potentially illegal.

But celebrities who engage in flagrant attacks on social media are rewarded with worldwide attention. President Donald Trump's most popular tweet to date is a video that shows him fake-pummeling a personification of CNN. Reality TV star Rob Kardashian was trending last week after attacking his former fiance on Instagram in a flurry of posts so explicit his account was shut down. He continued the attacks on Twitter, where he has more than 7.6 million followers.

While public interest in bad behavior is nothing new, social media has created a vast new venue for incivility to be expressed, witnessed and shared. And experts say it's affecting social interactions in real life.

"Over time, the attitudes and behaviors that we are concerned with right now in social media will bleed out into the physical world," said Karen North, a psychologist and director of the University of Southern California's Digital Social Media Program. "We're supposed to learn to be polite and civil in society. But what we have right now is a situation where a number of role models are acting the opposite of that ... And by watching it, we vicariously feel it, and our own attitudes and behaviors change as a result."

Catherine Steiner-Adair, a psychologist and author of "The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age," said she's already seeing the effects.

She said she's been confronted by students across the country asking why celebrities and political leaders are allowed to engage in name-calling and other activities for which they would be punished.

On some middle-school campuses, "Trumping" means to grab a girl's rear end, she said.

And teenagers have killed themselves over the kind of slut-shaming and exposure of private images Kardashian leveled at Blac Chyna, with whom he has an infant daughter.

"We are normalizing behaviors, and it's affecting some kids," Steiner-Adair said. "And what's affecting kids that is profound is their mistrust of grown-ups who are behaving so badly. Why aren't they stopping this?"

Social media satisfies a human need for connection. Users bond over common interests and establish digital relationships with their favorite public figures, following and commenting on their lives just like they do their friends'.

Gossip is a bonding activity, and it doesn't take a Real Housewife to know people love to share dirt about others' perceived misdeeds. Collective disapproval creates a feeling of community, regardless of which side you're on. Having a common enemy is "one of the strongest bonding factors in human nature," North said.

With 352,000 retweets, Trump's CNN-pummeling post isn't in the realm of Ellen DeGeneres' Oscar selfie (3.4 million retweets). And Kardashian's rant against Chyna paled in popularity with Beyonce's Instagram pregnancy announcement, which collected 8 million likes.

Still, Trump's attack tweets have proven his most popular, according to a new study by Ohio State University Professor Jayeon "Janey" Lee.

"Attacks on the media were most effective," Lee said of her analysis of tweets posted during the presidential campaign. "Whenever Trump criticized or mocked the media, the message was more likely to be retweeted and 'favorited.' "

Trump, who has 33.4 million Twitter followers, has defended his social-media approach as "modern day presidential."

Cyber incivility, particularly when practiced by cultural leaders, can have a profound impact on human relations, North said.

Studies show that young people who witness aggressive behavior in adults model and expand on that behavior. She pointed to Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura's famous "Bobo Doll Experiment," which found that kids who saw adults hit a doll in frustration not only hit the doll as well, but attacked it with weapons.

Social media is an atmosphere devoid of the social cues that mitigate behavior in real life, she said. When violating social norms in person, there's immediate feedback from others through body language and tone of voice. No such indicators exist online, and retweets can feel like validation.

Cruel and humiliating posts often become "an instant hit online," Steiner-Adair said. "It's one of the best ways to become popular."

Viral posts then get mainstream media attention, spreading digital nastiness into everyday conversation.

By not expressly rejecting cruel or hateful online behavior, "we are creating a bystander culture where people think this is funny," she said.

"When we tolerate leaders in the popular media like a Kardashian, or a president behaving in this way, we are creating a very dangerous petri dish for massive cultural change," Steiner-Adair said.

Young people, who may be the most plugged in, are getting mixed messages as they form their moral concepts.

"It behooves us all to question why we are participating in this mob of reactivity," Steiner-Adair said, "and what are the character traits we need to model for our children."

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From Trump Tweets to Kardashian saga, how online behavior affects kids in real life - Chicago Tribune

During the campaign and into his presidency Donald Trump repeatedly exaggerated and distorted crime statistics. Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed, he asserted in his dark speech at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. But the data here is unambiguous: FBI statistics show crime has been going down for decades.

CNNs Jake Tapper confronted Trumps then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, right before the speech. How can the Republicans make the argument that somehow its more dangerous today, when the facts dont back that up? Tapper asked.

People dont feel safe in their neighborhoods, Manafort responded, and then dismissed the FBI as a credible source of data.

This type of exchange where a journalist fact-checks a powerful figure is an essential task of the news media. And for a long time, political scientists and psychologists have wondered: Do these fact checks matter in the minds of viewers, particularly those whose candidate is distorting the truth? Simple question. Not-so-simple answer.

In the past, the research has found that no only do facts fail to sway minds, but they can sometimes produce whats known as a backfire effect, leaving people even more stubborn and sure of their preexisting belief.

But theres new evidence on this question thats a bit more hopeful. It finds backfiring is rarer than originally thought and that fact-checks can make an impression on even the most ardent of Trump supporters.

But theres still a big problem: Trump supporters know their candidate lies, but that doesnt change how they feel about him. Which prompts a scary thought: Is this just a Trump phenomenon? Or can any charismatic politician get away with being called out on lies?

In 2010, political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler published one of the most talked about (and most pessimistic) findings in all of political psychology.

The study, conducted in the fall of 2005, split 130 participants into groups who read different versions of a news article about President George W. Bush defending his rationale for engaging in the Iraq War. One version merely summarized Bushs rationale There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks. Another version of the article offered a correction that, no, there was not any evidence Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

The results were stunning: Staunch conservatives who saw the correction became more likely to believe Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. (In another experiment, the study found a backfire on a question about tax cuts. On other questions, like on stem cell research, there was no backfire.)

Backfire is a pretty radical claim if you think about it, Ethan Porter, a political scientist at George Washington University, says. Not only do attempts to correct information not sink in, but they can actually make conflicts even more intractable. It means earnest attempts to educate the public may actually making things worse. So in 2015, Porter and a colleague, Thomas Wood at the Ohio State University, set out to try to replicate the effect for a paper (which is currently undergoing peer review for publishing in the journal Political Behavior).

And among 8,100 participants and on the sort of political questions that tend to bring out hardline opinions Porter and Wood hardly found any evidence of backfire. (The one exception, interestingly, was the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But even on that, the backfire effect went away when they tweaked the wording of the question.)

Theres no evidence that backfire describes a common reflex of Americans when it comes to facts, Porter assures me. (Nyhan, for his part, never asserted that backfire was ubiquitous, just that it was a possible and particularly consequential result of fact-checking.)

Stories of failed replications in social psychology often grow ugly, with accusations of bullying and scientific misconduct flying in both directions. But in this story, researchers decided to team up to test the idea again.

The fact that Nyhan and Reiflers breakthrough study didnt replicate isnt a shocker. This happens all the time in science. One group of researchers publishes a breakthrough finding. Another lab tries to replicate it, and fails.

But instead of feuding, Nyhan, Reifler, Porter, and Wood came together to conduct a new study.

If you believe in social science, this is an ideal way to resolve a dispute, Porter says. If we can devise an experiment together, then the results are going to have something meaningful to say about our differing understandings of the world.

So the four researchers collaborated on two experiments with a wide range of people as subjects, including Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters.

The first experiment drew on Trumps exaggerations of crime statistics.

In the experiment, participants read one of five news articles. One was a control article about bird watching. Another just contained a summary of Trumps message without a correction. The third was an article that included a correction. The fourth included a correction, but then also a line of pushback from onetime Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who said the FBIs statistics were not to be trusted. The fifth included a line where Manafort really laid into the FBI, saying, "The FBI is certainly suspect these days after what they just did with Hillary Clinton.

The thinking here: If anyone should be able to incite a backfire effect among Trump supporters, its Trumps campaign director. Manafort gives Trump supporters cover. They can reject the correction and cite one of the most influential figures in the campaign. And if theres a time backfire ought to occur, its during a presidential campaign, when our political identities are fully activated.

But it didnt happen. On average, all the studys participants were more likely to accept the correction when they read it. Trump supporters were more hesitant to accept it than Clinton supporters. But thats not backfire; thats reluctance. Manaforts assertion that the FBI statistics were not to be trusted didnt make much of a difference either.

Everyones beliefs about changing crime over the last 10 years became more accurate in the face of a correction, Nyhan says.

The research group then conducted a second experiment during the presidential debates. This one was conducted in near-real time: On the night of the first presidential debate, the group ran an online study with 1,500-plus participants.

The study focused on one Trump claim in particular. Trump said thousands of jobs [are] leaving Michigan, Ohio ... theyre just gone.

This, again, isnt true. The Bureau of Labor Statistics actually finds both states created 70,000 new jobs in the previous year. Half of the participants saw the correction; the other half did not.

Again, the researchers found no evidence of backfire. Its worth underscoring: This was on the night of the first presidential debate. Its the Super Bowl of presidential politics. If corrections arent going to backfire during a debate, when will they?

In both experiments, the researchers couldnt find instance of backfire. Instead, they found that corrections did what they were intended to do: nudge people toward the truth. Trump supporters were more resistant to the nudge, but they were nudged all the same.

But heres the kicker: The corrections didnt change their feelings about Trump (when participants in the corrections conditions were compared with controls).

People were willing to say Trump was wrong, but it didnt have much of an effect on what they felt about him, Nyhan says.

So facts make an impression. They just dont matter for our decision-making, which is a conclusion thats abundant in psychology science.

(And if youre thinking, How could one short experimental manipulation really change how much participants like Trump? know that other research shows its possible. Notably, studies conducted during the election found that just reminding white voters they may be a racial minority one day increased support for Trump.)

The big question is: To what extent do those results generalize beyond Trump himself? says Nyhan. Many of his supporters may have to come to terms with his records of misstatements by the time this study was conducted.

Nyhan is reluctant to place the blame on Trump supporters themselves its just human nature to stand by our political partys candidates. But he says theres something wrong with our institutions, norms, and party leaders who enable the rise of candidates who constantly lie.

At least its nice to know that facts do make an impression, right? On the other hand, we tend to avoid confronting facts that run hostile to our political allegiances. Getting partisans to confront facts might be easy in the context of an online experiment. Its much harder to do in the real world.

These results have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal so treat them as preliminary. But I did run them by several political science and psychology researchers for a sniff test.

These two experiments are well done, and the data analysis appears to straightforward and correct: we observe clear movement on subjects beliefs as a result of factual corrections, Alex Coppock, who researches political decision-making at Yale, writes in an email. This piece is nice because it adds to the (small but growing) consensus that backfire effects, if they exist at all, are rare.

Others commended the researchers for collaborating in the face of conflicting results. I think this is exactly how the scientific process should operate as we try to explain human behavior, Asheley Landrum, who researches politically motivated reasoning at Texas Tech, writes. Social scientists, arguably, should be even more aware of motivated reasoning, recognizing that it also occurs in scientists.

Nyhans research is about seeing if attitude change is possible. And this research often comes to frustrating ends. In one study, he and Reifler tested out four different interventions to try to nudge vaccine skeptics away from their beliefs. None made a difference. Though it is illusive, at the least, he found a little attitude change within himself.

Jason [Reifler] and I have definitely updated our beliefs about the prevalence of the backfire effect, Nyhan says. He wont say its been debunked. But hes moving in that direction.

Link:
Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don't care. - Vox

Many of the stories are about power, and the violence, both implicit and explicit, imbued in its existence. The entirety of Ants reads When I crushed a large number of ants by accident with my feet, I realized that weakness is punishment without wrongdoing. It has that special quality that give allegories their power: It seems obvious, but only after you finish it. Many of the stories use animals or household objects as a window into the human. Later, in Greatest Creatures, a mother ant and a son ant are discussing which species is better, humans or ants. The story ends when the mother points out that, though humans have many geniuses among them, theyve been unable to prevent the catastrophic from occurring, and the fact that ants have prevented it makes them better. Like Alomars best work, it makes a point that is equal parts silly and compelling: By most metrics, humans seem a great deal more important than ants, but it also seems obvious that whichever species finds a way to avoid destroying itself is the better one.

In Who Deserves a Muzzle? a dog watches his owners shout at one another and considers whether it makes sense that he be required to wear a muzzle and collar when his behavior is so much better than theirs. Later, in They Dont Know How to Bark, two dogs reflect with sympathy and pity on humans poor sense of smell and ugly language. Again, Alomar is being fundamentally ridiculous while making an odd sort of sense: Hes writing against the arrogance that can come from a limited perspective. But these are not childrens fables: Alomar often centers greed, arrogance, cruelty, and above all, folly. When inanimate objects attempt to replicate what they see from humans as a means of self-determination, it has disastrous consequences, like in the collections title story:

Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of human class differences. They strived to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below. After a little while, the combs owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found it in this state, he threw it in the garbage.

In Alomars world, human behavior seems destructive, even to people, as long as theyre not the ones theyre observing. The change in perspective is what reveals human beings as ridiculous: If it is ridiculous for a comb to be vain, how ridiculous is it for a person?

Throughout the stories, humanity is often portrayed as the enemy of everything within its striking distance. But the harm is often inflicted in the background, like its just something that happens. When Alomar turns his attention to the elements that make that harm possible, things begin to feel much less silly. In A Taste, the devil tastes a drop of human hatred, is poisoned, and dies. Alomar hits this note again in Human Malice, where an argument between a nuclear bomb and a grenade over which is more evil is ended when human malice intervenes and points out that it created them both. Alomar posits hatred and malice as elements of human nature, not its sum total, but in emphasizing their destructive powers, he recognizes their control over the way huge swaths of the world lives. The effect is that Alomars stories give brief flashes of insight into the magnitude of human evil, like staring directly into the sun for a moment before having to look away.

Its not that Alomar is cynical; hes exhausted. Journey of Life, the first story in The Teeth of the Comb, follows a nameless, sexless character as they pour over maps and walk through crowds shouting for a beloved they never find. The true object of the search is only revealed in the last line: I stood on my shaking legs and continued my journey, searching for humanity until the last moment. The character maintains hope because they are willing to continue searching, but the reader can see the truth: theyll be looking forever. Importantly, Alomar does not denigrate his character for their wrongheadedness; instead, he casts the quest as noble, in spite of its futility.

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How a Syrian Writer Takes on War - New Republic